Red Sorghum

A beautiful and unforgettable classic set in 1930s rural China from the Nobel Prize-winning author

Mo Yan deserves a place in world literature. His voice will find its way into the heart of the reader, just as Kundera and Garcia Marquez have.

His idiom has the spiralling invention and mytho-maniacal quality of much world literature of a high order, from Vargas Llosa to Rushdie.

Brilliant, lyrical and intoxicating.

One of China's leading writers... Mo Yan stands out in China's literary scene. His work rings with refreshing authenticity.

A real heir to Lu Xun, a fine Chinese writer deeply concerned with the gate of his fellow men.

One of the most unusual and powerful fictional works of modern times.

Mo Yan was born in 1956 in Shandong, northeastern China. The author of over forty short stories and five novels, he is the most critically acclaimed Chinese writer of his generation, in both China and the West. The critically acclaimed film version of the novel, Red Sorghum, won first prize in the Golden Bear Awards at the Berlin Film Festival in 1988. 
 
He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2012.

Spanning three generations, this novel of family and myth is told through a series of flashbacks that depict events of staggering horror set against a landscape of gemlike beauty as the Chinese battle both the Japanese invaders and each other in the turbulent 1930s. 
 
As the novel opens, a group of villagers, led by Commander Yu, the narrator's grandfather, prepare to attack the advancing Japanese. Yu sends his 14-year-old son back home to get food for his men; but as Yu's wife returns through the sorghum fields with the food, the Japanese start firing and she is killed. 
 
Her death becomes the thread that links the past to the present and the narrator moves back and forth recording the war's progress, the fighting between the Chinese warlords and his family's history.

Mo Yan

Howard Goldblatt

Harrowing, haunting, poignant . . . Mo Yan proves himself a novelist of the highest calibre

One of China's leading writers . . . his work rings with refreshing authenticity

Takes solid aim at perhaps the most notorious act of social planning the Chinese Communist Party has engineered. An expansive, fascinating cultural-political history.

His idiom has the spiralling invention and mytho-maniacal quality of much world literature of a high order, from Vargas Llosa to Rushdie

There is no denying the ease and beauty of his storytelling . . . this is often difficult subject matter - but never hard to read

Like Kafka, Yan has the ability to examine his society through a variety of lenses, creating fanciful, Metamorphosis-like transformations or evoking the numbing bureaucracy and casual cruelty of modern governments. Deftly explores the human toll of national policy and historical forces

Frog has that wonderful sense of flipping between the mundane and the fantastic... Both heartbreaking and absurd... a tragicomic tale

In Frog, Mo Yan turns his attention to the subject of China's one-child policy. A celebrated midwife, skilled at delivering babies in difficult rural circumstances, finds herself at the blunt end of enforcement of the country's controversial one-child policy. Through a complex family story told through letters and narrative forms, Mo explores the emotional and moral toll of state-controlled family planning on a traditional community that places a high value on a large family.

Mo Yan

Praise for Frog

Harrowing, haunting, poignant . . . Mo Yan proves himself a novelist of the highest calibre

One of China's leading writers . . . his work rings with refreshing authenticity

Takes solid aim at perhaps the most notorious act of social planning the Chinese Communist Party has engineered. An expansive, fascinating cultural-political history.

Harrowing, haunting, poignant . . . Mo Yan proves himself a novelist of the highest calibre

One of China's leading writers . . . his work rings with refreshing authenticity

Takes solid aim at perhaps the most notorious act of social planning the Chinese Communist Party has engineered. An expansive, fascinating cultural-political history.

Harrowing, haunting, poignant . . . Mo Yan proves himself a novelist of the highest calibre

One of China's leading writers . . . his work rings with refreshing authenticity

Takes solid aim at perhaps the most notorious act of social planning the Chinese Communist Party has engineered. An expansive, fascinating cultural-political history.

Books by Mo Yan

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